I had given no thought to this. My head was so far up my ass with this Lilly situation that I had paid hardly any attention to club business.
“I mean, I’m sure that if you got attacked at your place, you’d be beefing up reinforcements,” I said. “When we found out about Red Raven…”
I stopped myself. The last thing we needed was more internal strife, especially with everything coming to a head. I looked to Phoenix, who merely had bowed his head but done nothing more—probably because if he had, old tensions would have flared up.
“In any case,” I said. “We managed to kill a couple of guards, but that’s it.”
My eyes caught Patriot’s long enough to know he’d keep his mouth shut, but that wasn’t the issue.
The issue was that Lane was staring at me, and I could not bring myself to look into his eyes. What did it say that at a time when the two of us needed to come together and be truthful with each other, I was continuing to lie?
What did it say that I had arguably the most important civilian in this town for a full night... and I had gotten nothing noteworthy out of her?
It would be the same old story. Cole, the failure. Cole, the little brother who needed Lane to take care of everything. Cole, the guy who had to resort to desperate measures to find a woman.
Cole, the loser.
I suppose my actions said I would rather lie than be seen as that loser.
Some leader I was, huh?
“Well, that sucks, but it is what it is,” Lane said.
We spent a couple more minutes discussing what our next plans were before eventually deciding that we would take no further action for the moment, needing some time to think about our next strike. I banged the table to signal the end of the meeting.
But when I tried to rise, Lane—quietly—asked me to remain behind. Never had I so wished that we had a private church where people wouldn’t overhear us.
“Let’s go outside,” he said.
Even that drew curious eyes. An open church worked great right up to the point where it affected me negatively. And then…
I gotta stop doing this. Just because things with Lilly were odd and confusing and weird.
We moved to the back of the clubhouse.
“What really happened last night?” Lane said.
I pursed my lips, shrugged, and looked up into my brother’s eyes.
“I said what happened,” I said. “We got there, we took our two guards, and we saw nothing of Lucius.”
Lane folded his arms and waited to see if I’d say anything more. I felt like my heart was going to beat so fast, it would just give out. The peace between us felt so tenuous, and for all that we’d been through, for all the lives we had lost... if we let it go to waste because I couldn’t admit the truth about a woman…
Well, we’d be right back to where we started with this shit, wouldn’t we?
“Cole,” Lane said, painfully trying to keep his voice calm. “I’m very happy to see you being more assertive. I think we can both say that we’ve done a lot of growing up in the past year and a half, and I think Dad would be proud of us.”
He would have been.In Lane.
“But I still know when you’re hiding something to avoid stirring the pot,” Lane said. “All three of you are alive and unharmed, so clearly it’s not that one of you died. That’s good. But I need to know what happened so we can plan accordingly. Can you please tell me everything? Even something that you may think is insignificant?”
The problem was, “I took the daughter of our greatest enemy home and I think I’m attracted to her and I let her go without getting any information out of her,” was far from insignificant.
Actually, it was pretty damn shitty on my part. It would have reflected a complete lack of growth.
The number of reasons not to say anything—that Lilly was great, that I’d let Lilly go, that Lilly hadn’t actually provided any information for whatever reason, that I wasn’t sure Lilly even had any good information to provide—far, far, far outweighed the reasons to say anything.
Plus... stupid to say, but I didn’t like the idea that Lane would forever be the one to check on me and lord over me. I wanted us to be equals, and in a lot of ways, we were, but this very conversation was undermining that. Why did I have to be the one answering to Lane all the time? Why couldn’t Lane answer to me for once?
